U.S. Girls Ages 11 to 14 at Risk for Sex Trafficking: Panel

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls
in the U.S. are subject to sexual trafficking every year, and
few cases of child rape are ever prosecuted, said Malika Saada
Saar, founder of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights.

Girls between ages 11 and 14 are particularly at risk, and
more American-born than foreign-born children are being bought
and sold for sex in this country, Saar said in a panel
discussion at the Women in the World conference in New York City
on March 11. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that
“about 293,000 American youth are currently at risk of becoming
victims of commercial exploitation.”

Actor Ashley Judd, who was also on the panel, recounted a
story of a 14-year-old girl she knows who was separated from her
family in the Atlanta airport, the country’s busiest. She was
located five days later after having been picked up by a man and
forced to have sex with men 15 times a day, Judd said. ‘There’s
a high volume of pedophiles who come in just for the day’’ to
seek sex with underage girls, Judd said.

“We tell women who are abused to run, but when girls run,
they become vulnerable to the pimps,” Saar said. “We don’t put
the trafficker or the pimp behind bars. When you go and talk to
survivors of trafficking, they talk about how they are the ones
who were arrested.”

U.S. states have been rewriting laws to make them tougher
on traffickers and the people who pay for sex. Earlier this
month, the Georgia House of Representatives passed some of the
most progressive legislation in the country on girls and
prostitution. The new rules impose higher fines and longer
sentences, with a 25-year minimum prison sentence for those
found to have coerced someone under 18. Buying sex with a 16-year-old would bring a sentence of at least 5 years.

Statutory-Rape Laws

Saar, whose group advocated for pulling adult services
listings from Craigslist.org, said new laws aren’t necessary to
address the problem. “There are statutory rape laws,” she
said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton convened a Cabinet-level meeting Feb. 1 to coordinate the federal fight against
human trafficking. The task force, established by President
Barack Obama, meets at least once a year. It is coordinated by
the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking
in Persons, which was created by the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act of 2000.

The trafficking of men women and children for labor and
commercial sex is a “serious” problem in the U.S., the State
Department said in its 10th annual report, published in June
2010, which grades 175 nations on their efforts to fight
trafficking.